Coping up with failures

Rajesh Bhola

While facing life’s ambushes we often fail. Nobody gets away unscathed from failures. I come across people who believe that they have reached those crossroads of their lives where their lives have been irremediably damaged by their having been not successful in attaining what they aimed at. Can we take every success in life for granted?
We are all exposed to both success and failure. Yet all too often we live our lives pretending that the failure will not happen to us. In all personality grooming sessions we always talk at length about how to succeed. Have we ever groomed people for facing failures?
We are constantly put up against huge opponents whether it is winning the competition or getting into a school or a college and due to our upbringings, for the most part, we do not expect or know how to deal with things when they do not go our way. If we compete on a daily basis against life and its seemingly unlimited opportunities, we have to be ready to lose sometimes. We have to find victories, even when we lose.
There is the ultimate goal of victory, but to win you have to win over the entire process of achievement. There are things which we learn through failure and could not be learnt by us through success. We need to increase our capacity to cope up with failures. Success propels us into another realm of life whereas failure keeps us close to ground reality of life; gifts us with another saintly quality which is called endurance. Through failure, nature builds the quality of endurance into our lives.

We are not finished just because we fail. We are only finished if we give up and quit. Pick up the pieces of your failure and, having learned from it, go on.

There is story related to young boy who chose to forego his studies in order to pursue his dream of becoming jazz singer. Against his parents' wishes, he began playing in a jazz band. His musical talents were less than sterling, and soon he realized he was just another musician teetering on the brink of unemployment. Unlike many of his fellow musicians, he was able to manage the income he had, so those periods of unemployment were not nearly as devastating for him as they were for others. His musical colleagues recognized his talent for money management, and soon they had hired him to manage their finances - for a fee. This caused the young man to rethink his career goals, and changed the course of his life.

This failure's name is Greenspan, who later on rose up to being the chairman of Central Bank of USA. His failure taught him that money, rather than music was his forte, and we have all benefited from that epiphany when he gave the world the tenets of economic policies that ensured all round growth without inflation. It is not so much important in what we go through as in how we go through it. Though we may fail in the task that we have set out to do, if we respond to that failure with faith and courage, rather than with despair, bitterness, and depression, we are successful in totality of our lives.

We are not finished just because you fail. We are only finished if we give up and quit. Pick up the pieces of your failure and, having learned from it, go on. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who possesses great enthusiasm; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who loves fellow men; who values relationships; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those who neither know victory nor defeat.